How bad are off-brand PS1 memory cards?

blindinglights

blindinglights

CAGiversary!
I don't want to erase the saves on the two memory cards I have, so I need to buy a few more. I always read online that off-brand cards are a bad idea and they have a reputation for losing data. I find that strange considering my MadCatz 2x card (has the little slider switch on it) from 1995 still works today with no problems, but I guess I could be lucky?

Looking at the cheapest prices on eBay, I can buy six knock-offs for the price of one official card. At that kind of cost difference, wouldn't it just be easy to copy my saves on 2 cards as a backup instead of paying so much more for an official card or are they that unreliable?
 
I had the ones that need a disk to be used first to activate the memory card before playing a game. They never lost or corrupted memory but man was that SUPER annoying. I also have a mad cats game cube memory card i use on my wii with no issue. Why not buy used official memory cards? i bought 2 used official ps2 memory card for $8 shipped off ebay back in November, and they're good
 
Maybe things have changed over the last 12-15 years but in '97/'98 off brand memory cards were rubbish. I lost a lot important saves due to a crap off brand card in college. I never played NBA Live again.
 
If you ever want to play Squaresoft games, you need an official card or your saves will always be corrupted either immediately or over time. Other than those, I never had any problems with regular off brand cards.
 
I never had problems with the one I use. I say go for the six off-brand cards. Alternatively, if you've got a birthday, valentine, or other gift potentially coming up, capitalize on that and get someone else to buy an official card for you.
 
I've had friends who used 3rd part cards and had problems back in the day. Personally, I would just stick to the Sony PSOne memory cards. They're not that expensive and you don't have to worry about losing your saved data.
 
[quote name='AiNoKame']If you ever want to play Squaresoft games, you need an official card or your saves will always be corrupted either immediately or over time. Other than those, I never had any problems with regular off brand cards.[/QUOTE]

I pretty much only played Final Fantasy games on my PS1 & I used a Madcatz (I think) non-offical memory card and I never had a corruption issue.
 
I'd go official, personally, but if you have to go 3rd party for some reason, I'm in agreement with Cheapest in saying Interact cards were the best.

I learned this the hard way with a Nyko PSone card and Final Fantasy VII. I used the card with that game up until the end of Disc 1. A week later I wanted to start disc 2 when my system told me I had no save present for the game. Going into the memory card screen, my Nyko card was blank. I started up a new game on the official card and never looked back. Interestingly enough, when I was selling some PSone stuff to get a PS2, I did one last check on that card and suddenly my FF7 came back. Still didn't trust it, though, and away it went.
 
For PS1 all non Sony cards were reversed engineered, usually made with cheap ass parts. Avoid them because they are usually unreliable. Especially ones that are larger than 15 blocks, they generally use compression to make it possible and are highly prone to screwing up and losing / corrupting data.

For PS2 Sony got smart and just started licensing the technology out, so in general most PS2 cards are as good as Sonys.

Sony brand PS1 cards are cheap anyways.
 
Thanks for all the replies guys!


[quote name='vic_x51']Why not buy used official memory cards? i bought 2 used official ps2 memory card for $8 shipped off ebay back in November, and they're good[/QUOTE]

I was just looking at BIN prices because I was impatient. The prices I saw were $12 shipped per official card (used).



[quote name='AiNoKame']If you ever want to play Squaresoft games, you need an official card or your saves will always be corrupted either immediately or over time. Other than those, I never had any problems with regular off brand cards.[/QUOTE]

Strange, the off-brand card I have never went bad and I played through FF8, FF7, and both Parasite Eve games without problems.



[quote name='dumlaox']I'd go official, personally, but if you have to go 3rd party for some reason, I'm in agreement with Cheapest in saying Interact cards were the best.

I learned this the hard way with a Nyko PSone card and Final Fantasy VII. I used the card with that game up until the end of Disc 1. A week later I wanted to start disc 2 when my system told me I had no save present for the game. Going into the memory card screen, my Nyko card was blank. I started up a new game on the official card and never looked back. Interestingly enough, when I was selling some PSone stuff to get a PS2, I did one last check on that card and suddenly my FF7 came back. Still didn't trust it, though, and away it went.[/QUOTE]

That sucks about your FF7 save, I'm surprised that card was still around for you to find the save had reappeared later. Why didn't you destroy it in anger :).



[quote name='Chuplayer']1. Get a PS3.

2. Get a memory card adapter.

3. Enjoy an entire hard drive's worth of memory cards.[/QUOTE]

I never even thought of this and I just saw the thread about cheap memory card adapters a few days ago. I think I will probably go this route, thanks!



[quote name='QiG']Is http://img17.imageshack.us/i/pscard.jpg/ what you're looking for?

I have no use for it if you want it.[/QUOTE]

Thanks, I appreciate the offer, but I think I'm going to go with Chuplayer's suggestion. Thanks again though!
 
I've been burned multiple times before and will now only buy and use 'official' memory cards.

For PS2, I also have an AR Max which lets you move game saves to/from memory cards and USB thumb drives. So I use official cards, but I also have all my saves backed up on the PC.

Its also nice because you can download saves and put them onto your memory cards, perfect if you need to quickly unlock everything in a game you just want to play without going through a long story mode to unlock things. Like MvC2 for instance, just download a save to unlock all characters and colors, etc.
 
This thread reminds me of this awful 3rd party memory card my parents bought me for Christmas way back. It was one of those "mega" memory cards that had a ton of storage. It pretty much worked correctly, but you had to remove it everytime you turned the system on or off, or else all the data would get erased. Needless to say, that found its way into a storage bin pretty quickly.
 
All of my PSX memory cards from the 90's work still have all of my saves, first party and third party. The only memory card that ever corrupted on me was a crappy MadCatz Gamecube one.
 
I had a couple 3rd party PS1 cards and everything is still saved fine on those after all these years. Man were memory cards the biggest rip off ever, especially if you played a lot of sports games or Gran Turismo which would use at least 1/3 of the card.

I'm sure even Sony brand ones are dirt cheap now though so why not just get those?
 
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